Small Places, Large Issues - Fourth Edition by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Author:Thomas Hylland Eriksen [Eriksen, Thomas Hylland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781478413653
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Content Technologies, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Here, the mason was trying to convert a personal ritual gift to a decontextualised and quantifiable economic sum. Bourdieu explains that the mason thereby exposed ‘the device most commonly employed to keep up appearances by means of a collectively concerted make-believe’, the pretence that the economic transaction really amounted to a generous exchange of gifts. In pursuing this line of analysis, Bourdieu in a sense turns Mauss on his head, by focusing on the ways in which gifts and ‘total social phenomena’ conceal power relations and exploitative practices. Like Archetti’s Norwegian in the university cafeteria, the mason insisted on market exchange rather than gift exchange.

The kind of social integration and mutual obligations created through reciprocity are not necessarily beneficial to everyone involved. Indeed, feudal lords in medieval Europe frequently sustained their power by offering gifts to their subjects. It could also be argued that development aid from North to South is a subtle technique of domination, intended to ensure the continued submission of Southern governments to global policies pursued by the rich countries. The Ugandan president Idi Amin clearly understood this aspect of reciprocity when, some time in the 1970s, he was reported to have sent a shipload of bananas as emergency aid to crisis-stricken Britain.

In some interpretations of Mauss’s work on gift-giving and reciprocity in general, the institution of the gift is seen as constitutive of society as such. While the principle of gift-giving is certainly important – Lévi-Strauss, it should be recalled, based his theory of kinship on it – Mauss did not see it as the only principle of integration. He also wrote on sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; see also Chapter 14). The meaning of sacrifice, in Mauss’s view, was to establish a particular kind of relationship to divine powers, but it also served to integrate society.

A more radical view was introduced in Annette Weiner’s influential Inalienable Possessions (1992; see also Godelier 2009), which argues against the view usually associated with Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, according to which reciprocity is a fundamental social act. In Weiner’s view, reciprocity and exchange can often be seen as surface phenomena that serve as a foil for the ultimate concern of the people concerned, which amounts to the protection and preservation of assets that are felt to represent their very personal identity – that is, their inalienable possessions.

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